Roofs

Please spare us any more articles about gold diggers with grandfatherly hangups. You state that this woman because of her husband's money has responsibility and power. Over whom does she have this power? Your article is in extremely poor taste. With people having no roofs over their heads and no money for the barest necessities of life, you are parading this epitomy of greed in your paper. Shame on you. JOSEPH WILSON Newport Beach

Your Dec. 7 editorial, "Money's There, Repairs Aren't," contending that Proposition BB progress is slow-paced, only describes the half of the glass that's empty rather than the other half that is already full. While some schoolchildren "dodge the rain pouring through leaky roofs," students and staff members at over 40 schools will have brand-new roofs overhead when they return from the holiday break, thanks to the bond measure. With the State Allocation Board recently giving the green light to acquire land for a new high school in South Gate, one would be hard-pressed to say "plans for new schools creep along."

The process of building with earth and fire, used by Joseph Diliberti to construct his dome house, was developed by Southland architect Nader Khalili and is called "Geltaftan," from the Persian words for clay (gel) and firing or baking (taftan). The Iranian-born Khalili, who has taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Santa Monica (SCI-ARC) since 1982, believes Geltaftan could be a means of providing durable, low-cost housing for arid regions of the world.

October 3, 1985 | ALAN HESS, " Googie: Fifties Coffee Shop Architecture" by Alan Hess will be published in February by Chronicle Books, San Francisco. A Los Angeles native and graduate of the school of Architecture and Urban Planning at UCLA, Hess practices architecture in Marin County. and

You can get a glimpse of the 1950s vision of the future by visiting a coffee shop along Los Angeles' commercial strips. The shops' daring roofs sweep out over panoramic glass walls and lush plantings. Jazzy signs hang overhead with names as bright as neon. In the '50s and '60s, these shops spread the Space Age style across the nation from their birthplace in the car culture of Southern California as local chains grew.

A fire at a Chatsworth condominium complex left six people homeless and caused an estimated $300,000 in damage early today, the Los Angeles Fire Department said. There were no injuries in the fire, which was reported at 12:30 a.m. in the carport area of the complex in the 10200 block of Oklahoma Avenue near Chatsworth High School, officials said. The fire quickly spread to three of the nearby townhouses, which reportedly had wood shake shingle facings and roofs. About 80 firefighters controlled the blaze in an hour.

A 7-year-old boy was killed over the weekend when a crane attachment fell on him at a construction site, a spokeswoman for the Riverside County coroner said Monday. Rusty Chase of Norco climbed on a large commercial dumpster and was jumping from it when he fell and was crushed by a huge metal device used in building roofs, authorities said.

September 7, 1986 | LOUIS HILL, Special to The Times and Hill is a Cypress free-lance writer. and

Each time I pass a garage sale, I am aware of our throwaway society and how much of our heritage is being discarded. It is then I shout loudly for the return of the attic. Not just a crawl space or a termite refuge, but a real, genuine, musty, cobwebby, dusty, creaky attic. Unfortunately, the attic in the West is as scarce as the front porch. Single-Story Houses And who gets the blame? Myopic architects and tight-fisted builders are the culprits.

In one of the driest regions on Earth, even a drizzle can cause an emergency. Less than 100th of an inch of rain fell on the Chilean port city of Iquique, accompanied by wind of about 10 mph. That was enough to knock out power to several neighborhoods and damage the roofs of 4,000 precarious dwellings, Gov. Miguel Silva said. With little water to worry about, many of Iquique's poor live in homes covered with bits of wood, plaster or cardboard that are easily damaged by a little rain and wind.

My friend Charlie and I were arguing about all the Chinese signs in our city. I said, "Charlie, what are you and your gang up to now? Last year you pushed our City Council into passing an ordinance to require some English on all signs; now, you want to make it two-thirds English. You really want to eliminate all signs that are not in English, don't you?" Charlie looked around and whispered, "How did you ever guess? But keep it quiet; if we do it gradually, maybe they won't notice."